Crowd gathering or the presence of a crowd is a common phenomenon in modern day society. Gatherings may occur for various reasons and in various places such as at festivals, shopping malls, live performances, religious programs, celebrity gatherings, airports, railway stations, bus terminals, etc. While many gatherings start and end peacefully, there always remains a possibility of unfortunate events occurring at a crowd gathering. For example, stampedes or crowd gathering driven violence resulting from a gathering which does not end peacefully can lead to damage to property and/or threat to life. An average individual either at the gathering or in close proximity thereto is usually uninformed and, therefore, unprepared to deal with volatility and threat to life and/or property in situations where the gathering gets unruly. Therefore, the average individual may not be able to protect himself or his loved ones in such a situation.
Efforts have been put forth in the past to gather data about crowd gatherings. For example, information regarding traffic conditions is routinely monitored by city authorities to possibly plan for resource allocation in areas that are experiencing high traffic build-up. In other instances, organizations like shopping mall owners/managers are using tools to collect information regarding the foot-fall at a shopping mall or, more specifically, a particular shop to understand consumer patterns etc. Most of the monitoring currently being used is through cameras installed at public places, the cameras having multi-directional counting features with algorithms that can gather information regarding crowds, shadows and non-human objects and provide key information relating to intensity of crowd gathering.
Examples of specific commercial products in the market are Crowd Optic and SceneTap. Crowd Optic, a developer of crowd-driven mobile solutions for enterprises, monitors crowd viewing, photo and video taking behavior in real time and recognizes clusters of wireless devices in the crowd gathering that are focused on the same zone. This allows the tool to give indications of center of focus and momentum, as well as any anomalous activity in the crowd gathering—based on the monitoring of the wireless device. SceneTap allows an end user to view real-time data on crowd sizes, gender ratios, and the average age of patrons in a given location, and hence can be used to monitor crowd demographics in a given location.
However, these current solutions do not analyze crowd behavior or have any rating or similar classification of a given crowd gathering. The current solutions also do not provide information regarding the nature and composition of a crowd gathering to a user who is in the vicinity of such a crowd gathering. Moreover, there is no product or service that collects and processes information on crowd behavior to generate alert messages relating to the crowd behavior, especially when the identified crowd gathering is posing a threat to the individual, and further transmits the alert messages to wireless devices based on the location of the user/device vis-à-vis the crowd gathering.
Therefore, despite the current solutions available to the public, when a user(s) is caught in the midst of an unknown frenzied crowd gathering, contacting a third party (e.g., family, friend or relative) or emergency services, using a telephone (wireless or otherwise) may not be feasible and hence, diverting help to the distressed user(s) may be delayed. Even in situations where the individual has prior information of a crowd gathering, the gathering may suddenly turn unruly and the above problem of contacting someone for assistance may be thwarted and/or delayed. This situation is more pronounced in countries with high population densities, where crowd gatherings can go up to millions in a short period of time. For example, in India, the ‘Kumbh Mela’ an annual gathering of pilgrims and tourists around the banks of the confluence of three rivers in northern India, attracts up to 70 million people over a period of 56 days. The foot fall in the area in question crosses several million per day during the peak days of the festival. Unfortunately, currently, there is no facility to notify individual user(s) of crowd behaviour that can escalate into damage of life and property. There is also no system or process in place that would notify the requisite authorities to precipitate assistance when crowd behaviour starts escalating to a point where threat to property and/or life becomes imminent. The response of civic bodies such as police, fire brigade, ambulance is initiated once the incident has happened i.e., after the crowd gathering has turned volatile which, in many instances may be too late.
Thus, situations exist where a crowd gathering culminates in a volatile situation that poses a threat to the safety of individuals who are inadvertently caught in such a situation and are not equipped to protect themselves. In view of this, there is a need for providing information, visual and/or textual, related to a crowd gathering to a user device to assist a user(s) to take necessary precautionary measures in order to avoid such crowd gatherings or to seek required safe and secured environment for himself, his family and his property when in close proximity to the crowd gathering. Accordingly, there is a need for a method and tool for determining crowd gathering behaviour based on, for example, processing of inputs from various sources; processing the information on the crowd gathering to classify the threat level to life or property; generating alert messages based on the classification of the crowd gathering; identifying user devices to transmit the alert messages, based on the proximity of the user(s) to the crowd gathering; and transmitting the message to the user device so as to equip the user with adequate information to prepare and plan for ways to avert the crowd gathering.